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Autumn 2018 pub crawl Manchester Friday 12th October

This may seem premature but it does seem to take so long to thrash out a venue and date and to get the best value tickets (and cheapo hotels) it needs to be done 12 weeks before the event.
I've come up with this list of places :-

Lancaster
Macclesfield
Newcastle
Durham
Sheffield

Two left field suggestions:-
Chesterfield
Chorley & Leyland

I hope others will come up with more ideas. I'd like to see an area of Manchester that was away from the City centre.

This may seem premature but it does seem to take so long to thrash out a venue and date and to get the best value tickets (and cheapo hotels) it needs to be done 12 weeks before the event.
I've come up with this list of places :-

Lancaster
Macclesfield
Newcastle
Durham
Sheffield

Two left field suggestions:-
Chesterfield
Chorley & Leyland

I hope others will come up with more ideas. I'd like to see an area of Manchester that was away from the City centre.

Preferably somewhere with cheap train ticket deals.

"Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer."
-W.C.Fields

It seems to me that the problem for you is avoiding having to travel into London especially on a weekday out. I assume you would also have to pay through the nose to get through London.
My best suggestion would be to make a long weekend of it. Of course this is easy when you're retired and the only problem is that you never get a day off.
Getting advance rail tickets and hotel bookings is so much cheaper the further in advance you can do it. I'm going on the Severn Valley Railway at the end of the month and managed to get a night's stay in Stourbridge for around £30.00.

Just to clarify what I was getting at with Manchester. It has a great tram system and an all day ticket doesn't cost an arm and a leg. There must be a great crawl to be done from one end of the tram system to the centre. I don't know Manchester well enough to come up with a plan. To me the centre of Manchester has gone the same way as Leeds.
Last time I was there I had a fair bit of spare time so I ended up at Eccles with a robust JDW and a couple of Holt's pubs.

Some very good points have been made about giving lots of time to book time off work,get advanced train tickets and secure good deals on hotel accomodation.Looking back we always seem to choose a date in November,so we may need to settle on a day by something like the end of July.

At this stage I'm free apart from Saturday Nov. 10th and Friday Nov.30th

Some very good points have been made about giving lots of time to book time off work,get advanced train tickets and secure good deals on hotel accomodation.Looking back we always seem to choose a date in November,so we may need to settle on a day by something like the end of July.

It's the north in autumn again*: the furthest north we've been in summer was Wellington last year! Next year can we do the north in summer, please?

I would like to propose that we do the autumn crawl a little earlier this year. We always go for November because of the pressure on train tickets with the school half terms in the final week of October. But that means it's dark around 5pm and potentially pretty cold and wet too. So what about Friday, 12th October? (Sunset 2nd November is 16:31; on 12th October it's 18:16.) Train tickets for this date will go on sale around the middle of July, I reckon. Surely we can make a decision by then...

Just to clarify what I was getting at with Manchester. It has a great tram system and an all day ticket doesn't cost an arm and a leg. There must be a great crawl to be done from one end of the tram system to the centre. I don't know Manchester well enough to come up with a plan. To me the centre of Manchester has gone the same way as Leeds.

This seems like the makings of a plan. (Imagine the trailer voiceover.) We've done the bus crawl in London and the train crawl between Wellington and Wolverhampton. Now Pubs Galore does: A Manchester tram crawl. I like it.

It's the north in autumn again*: the furthest north we've been in summer was Wellington last year! Next year can we do the north in summer, please?

I would like to propose that we do the autumn crawl a little earlier this year. We always go for November because of the pressure on train tickets with the school half terms in the final week of October. But that means it's dark around 5pm and potentially pretty cold and wet too. So what about Friday, 12th October? (Sunset 2nd November is 16:31; on 12th October it's 18:16.) Train tickets for this date will go on sale around the middle of July.

I think that makes a lot of sense, it's before the clock change which makes the evenings an hour longer regardless of how far the sun has gone away. At the moment I've got a visit to Wales booked for early October and another unconfirmed one for the week after your proposed date so the 12th of October looks good to me. I don't think weather should be a constraint as it can throw a spanner in the works at any time of the year as I discovered last March. Even last Thursday when I travelled to Wolverhampton all the Scotland trains were ending at Preston. So, who can and can't make the 12th of October? I'm in!

I didn't get a chance to speak to him on Thursday and I suspect he's gone away as he put two weeks BOTW entries up yesterday. I was surprised to find that Greater Manchester is one of my top review counties but I only know the odd pocket. Despite my connections with Wales I don't have the faintest idea where Ramsbottom is!

For me these tram systems are a great thing. I think I've used them all now, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Dublin.